


getaway car

by storyteller2345



Category: Figure Skating RPF
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-08-20
Updated: 2019-08-22
Packaged: 2020-09-19 10:23:03
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 5,167
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20329573
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/storyteller2345/pseuds/storyteller2345
Summary: He has a new midnight ritual. When he can’t sleep.





	1. Chapter 1

He has a new midnight ritual. When he can’t sleep. He slips downstairs and out of the house into the humid night; holds onto the railing of the deck to ground himself. Takes deep breaths—the air is soft, humid, even at 1 a.m., 2 a.m.

It’s so different from Canada. From Montreal, from Detroit, from all the places he’s lived and trained; it was humid there, too, sometimes, but it wasn’t the same, just a season and gone. This is constant, a low-hanging thickness to the air that wraps you up and swaddles you and makes it difficult to move, to think; it never goes away and inevitably you give up and sink into it, deeper and deeper, until it’s all you can feel. You move with it, almost like a dance.

Thoughts like this are the ones that wake him up. He palms his phone impatiently and here it is; this is the ritual—he opens his contacts and scrolls to her name and hovers his finger over it, almost feeling the electrical conduit between the screen and him.

It’s funny, y’know? He never was much of a phone guy. He used to lose it a lot, leave it at the rink or in his car when he was in the rink, skating; it would drive T and Marie-France and Patch crazy, because they’d be trying to get hold of him for something and he would come back to twenty increasingly exasperated texts and a scrolling list of missed calls, where _are _you Scott; goddammit, don’t you ever have your phone?

Now it’s like his phone is glued to his hand. He keeps checking it, obsessively. Not social media; he still hates that shit. The thought sends his eyes darting up to the window of their bedroom, one dark spot in the hot dark night. She’s on social a lot, his fiancée; she told him once, “Oh, you know, I followed you and Tessa, all you guys, for years; isn’t that funny?” and he didn’t say anything, just smiled and sipped his beer and let all the pictures she must have seen swarm stickily by his eyes like flies stuck in syrup.

He sets the phone down on the railing. After a minute the screen goes dark and there’s just the hot night again, an ambient rustling in the trees. Here and there the night sounds of animals: a dog bark in the distance, what he thinks are frogs croaking. He’s not sure. Aren’t the frogs dying, struggling in the heat, the global warming? Something he read or something T heard on the radio and told him about when they were driving, always driving, nags at his mind and he pushes it away, picks up the phone again, lets the screen come alive.

Flips to his contacts.

Selects her name.

Lets his finger hover.

~

What would he even say if he made the call?

That’s what he’s thinking tonight. He’s out on the driveway this time, other side of the house; gotta mix it up, gotta keep life interesting. Funny to think what “interesting” used to entail—he feels, for a moment, the weight of the Canadian flag in his hands, the heat of lights burning down on his face even as the ground scorched up cold through his feet. T beside him, hugging her before they processed out, leading the nation, both so nervous they could hardly stand it, but in him it wasn’t nerves, it was giddiness, fizzing, crazy; he couldn’t stop touching her, hugging her, glaring at the bobsledders who kept circling closer in a pack and moving away when they met his eyes. He didn’t think Tessa even noticed them, lost in the crowd, the excitement of the night, her eyes shining like stars.

_Fuck_.

The screen lights up in his hand and he gets excited for a second, but it’s nothing; some alert from some app he doesn’t even remember downloading. He swipes it away, opens his contacts. T’s probably up; she was never any good at sleeping before, total night owl, and she’s probably not much better now, not with all that’s going on. They always tended to cycle together, when they were sleeping and when they weren’t. They had the same stressors, after all. It made sense. Though who knows how that works when you’re a hell of a lot of miles apart. Maybe she’s sleeping like a baby, worn out by photoshoots and hosting gigs and galas and hot yoga classes and smiling prettily for Instagram.

So she’s awake. So she might read this. What would he say?

Some nights, when he and his fiancée have stayed up too late, or the party went too long, or he drank too many beers and slipped past the smooth flying buzz he craves these days, feels his eyes droop and his vowels slur out too long, on those nights he doesn’t want to call. T doesn’t need to hear that; he’s not sure it’s in keeping with the picture he wants to send, by not sending pictures, by keeping them determinedly apart.

So he types out messages, or thinks them up in his head but doesn’t type them because his fingers are too big and ham-handed on the keys.

_What are we going to do abt tix sales_

Bait he knows T can’t resist. They’re months out and haven’t done any promos yet, but if he knows her at all—and sometimes he isn’t sure he does—she’s been poring over the numbers and furrowing her brow and clenching her jaw when she sees the drop-off from last year. He’s not sure how she’d respond, though. He’s not holding up his end of the bargain when it comes to promoting and he knows it, but he knows she knows why and her calling him on his bullshit would dropkick them both into a deep pool he doesn’t necessarily want to navigate just now, with the night air clammy on his face and the darkness like a swamp he doesn’t think he’ll ever find his way out of.

_Have u talked to MF and P_

Both of whom are probably pissed at him, too. Still, that’s a good one. Open-ended. He opens the message app, blinks, trying to get the screen to clear before his foggy eyes. Maybe he’ll do this; he’ll fucking do it, get the ball rolling.

The last message T sent him is there, hanging, unanswered: _Hey Scott! Can you get back to T-Town by Tuesday? Some good press leads and we want to keep this momentum going! :)_

He has never once heard her call Toronto “T-Town” in his whole goddamn life. Where is she coming up with this shit?

It’s funny, he thinks, his thumb scrolling almost compulsively up and down the screen, tracking back over days and then weeks heading into months heading into years of messages, of jokes, of travel arrangements, of pictures; here’s a meme he sent her, there’s a picture of a mascot she texted him once, maliciously, in a very different middle-of-the-night. Funny that he spends every night out here talking to her in his head, and when she actually asks a question, a boring yes/no question he can answer in two seconds by booking his plane ticket to good ol’ T-Town, no words come.

_Sure_, he types in the message box. It looks cold, so he adds a :), just like T would. Then it looks dickish, like he’s mocking her, so he deletes the :) and adds an exclamation point, _Sure!_, and now this is getting fucking pathetic so he turns off his phone without sending any message at all and holds it tight in his hand like he’s going to hurl it through the basketball hoop above his head, his pulse pumping hard and then harder in his veins.

What would he even say if he made the call?

“It doesn’t matter, T.”

Not anymore. Never again.

_ It doesn’t fucking matter._

~

She has a new midnight ritual, and it is profoundly, incredibly embarrassing.

No one must ever know.

Before 12:30, 1 a.m., she is _on_. She is smiling; she is posting photos; she is taking photos; she is smiling some more, working one room, then another; cycling through outfits; winning hearts and minds, you could say. She hopes people say that.

She is selling makeup, dolls, more makeup, beds she won’t sleep on and food she will never, not once in a million years, figure out how to cook. She is coming home and collapsing, blissfully tired, onto her white couch in her white living room in her still, quiet house, which has been cleaned, well and discreetly, during the day while she’s out. A flower arrangement nestles on the windowsill—right now it’s peonies, pink, a shock of color in the still, white room, the petals like a handful of lace slowly unclenching itself. The air is lilac-scented and cool; she likes to keep the apartment cold. It reminds her of the rink, maybe; helps her sleep.

She sits on that white couch and takes long, deep breaths, and then she gets up, washes her face, makes a cup of mint tea—this is new; she’s trying something new—and gets ready for bed.

The door of the bedroom is where she pauses. There are a lot of reasons. Primarily, she tells herself, she’s not tired. Maybe she should get the scent in the air switched. Try lavender. 

Back to the kitchen. Another cup of tea. The first one went cold on the table in the living room. She doesn’t remember bringing it in there. She’s been zoning out a bit lately.

Back to the bedroom, and this time she gets into bed and makes a to-do list for tomorrow, an informal one, just to get herself in the right headspace. She makes it on her phone, which is a slippery slope, she knows, but it’s the most efficient way to ensure that her reminders are set. And she needs those reminders. Her days are packed.

Time slips past. Midnight. 12:30 a.m. One. Two years ago, she’d have been waking up in less than four hours, alarm blaring through the 5 a.m. dark; her going through the motions in a daze: shower, dress, coffee, banana, in the car and heading to the rink. Heading to Scott.

A memory stirs: both of them groggy, laughing in the lobby, at the door. The pale winter sun not yet up. Scott was trying to hold the door open for her, but somehow she was also trying to hold it open for him, and they were both saying, “You go first” at the same time, their voices layering over each other, and it was becoming a competition, “No, _you_”, and then he was pushing her through, gently, laughing, his hands warm; even through her thick coat she could feel them on her sides, the small of her back. She was reaching towards him, too, blindly, trying to pull him along with her, so she wasn’t going in alone; they were going together.

This is how it starts.

The bad habit.

She tries to pretend she’s not doing it; she opens Instagram and scrolls mindlessly down the stream of likes and comments; pauses here and there to like in return or reply. Then her thumb drifts, inevitably, to YouTube, and there it is, she’s doing it, pulling up videos of old performances.

Humiliating.

If her mom or sister knew, if anyone knew, hell, if _Scott _knew, there would be a million questions. Scott would probably be the worst. He’d be practical, knowing him, something about why YouTube Tess; you have professional footage of those dances; the angles are better; you can really see our feet, mark the lines. Well, joke’s on you, Scott, she thinks, lifting her mug of tea.

This one’s gone cold as well. Back to the kitchen. She pours a glass of white wine, continues the conversation in her head. Joke’s on you, Scott, because I don’t want to see our feet.

She wants to see their faces, the way the audience saw them, the way the commentators saw them. She wants to listen to the audio go silent, as if in awe, as she and Scott track together across the ice, so perfectly, almost ruthlessly, in unison. She wants to see the tiny mistakes, the moment when his hand slips or her foot shifts out of alignment; she wants to see them make eye contact and correct it, pull themselves back together and into almost ruthless sync. She wants to see them moving as one. She wants those four minutes on the ice back, and she wants them to never, ever end.

Real life, in contrast, is a fucking disappointment.

~

Morning comes too soon. She promised her sister she’d be at barre class, so she forces herself up like she’s lifting the world’s heaviest boulder off her shoulders and brushes back her hair. Looks down at her phone. She fell asleep with it in her hand last night, which is just—she shudders. _God, Tessa_. Get it together.

There’s a message from Scott on the screen.

Her heart drops; she actually experiences it dropping, because he was always bad about texting, but prior to this year, she didn’t know what bad was, didn’t know how bad “bad” could be. So when she sees this message she feels her heart sliding down through her whole body to her stomach and her toes curl up and she can’t tell if it’s anticipation or fear or hope, but she knows she doesn’t want to read it; she thinks maybe she’ll look at it after barre class when she won’t be so rattled, when she’s had her coffee and sweated out some of her nerves.

She can’t wait, though. In the car, before she turns the key in the ignition, she gives in and opens it up.

_Sure_

Jesus Christ. She sits back in her seat and puts her hand over her eyes, presses her fingers very precisely and very hard into the pressure points at her temples that are supposed to promote a calming feeling. It has never worked, not once, but she remembers being taught the technique back at Canton by some hippie-dippie Italian skater and thinking it seemed like a nice idea, like, wouldn’t it be wonderful if you could just rub your head and make all the pain go away?

_Sure_

She doesn’t even know what Scott’s sure-ing. She’s not _sure_she cares. She turns the key and pulls out of the parking space with a screech, spins the car and stomps the brakes and jets onto the street with her knuckles going white on the wheel.

That’s enough, Tessa, she tells herself as she steers toward the barre studio. You are done.

She doesn’t mean it, not one bit. She ends the day by watching their _Umbrellas_. She doesn’t cry. They were perfect. They were.

It doesn’t matter.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> She stood on the sidewalk and took a deep breath, moved her fingers through air that didn’t feel humid, just crisp and cool on her skin, and she decided: tonight, yes, it’s okay to have fun.

“So what are you up to today?” Ernie asks. He’s shining the taps behind the bar. By now, Scott knows his cleaning routine well. Ernie will move on to dusting the bottles next, making them glimmer in the sleepy midday light. Only when everything is shining and spotless will he start cutting fruit, halving up lemons and limes with brutal efficiency for the nightly Corona rush.

They’re right next to the beach, Ernie likes to say. Sand, you know, it gets in everything if you’re not careful.

Scott admires Ernie's work ethic, the way he approaches these small, concrete tasks with dogged persistency and good humor. It reminds him of skating, but even as the thought surfaces he’s smashing it down and away and lifting his beer to his lips.

“No plans?” Ernie says, and raises an eyebrow, and Scott shrugs.

Ernie’s in his fifties, aged in that indeterminate Florida way Scott is getting to know where someone is very tan and very fit and could fall easily into any decade between fifty and seventy. Ernie favors neon tank tops. Scott’s been wearing a lot more neon himself. Ernie knows Scott used to be famous, or “famous,” but he doesn’t give a fuck or seem to totally understand why, and this is part of why Scott likes Ernie.

“Plans,” Scott says, and spins his phone on the bar. T hasn’t texted him back. Not that he can blame her. “I’ve gotta go up to Toronto. Soon. Some work stuff.”

“That’s good,” Ernie says, and smiles, rubs the cleaning cloth he’s using back and forth between his hands; stretches it out to its full length and folds it in half, neatly, before secreting it away under the bar. “Working’s good. Look at me, down here in paradise. I retired early, I tell you that?”

Scott nods, but only a little, the tiniest dip of his chin. He doesn’t want Ernie to start talking. Or maybe he does. There’s a numbing quality to days like this, when his fiancée’s working and he knows he should get to the rink, or at least the gym, and practice, keep himself in shape. Run around the block, for fuck’s sake. Lift something heavier than a beer, as his fiancée likes to say with a wink, heading out the door to work. She’s just kidding, though. On her off days, she’ll join him, here at the beach, making mindless small talk with Ernie.

“Yup,” Ernie says, staring off down the white-yellow rise and fall of the sand behind them. “Retired early, and then I gotta tell you, man, I was bored shitless. So I got myself a job here. I always wanted to know how to make a daiquiri, right?” His eyes dart to Scott’s beer. “You want another?”

Scott shakes his head, spins his phone again. The screen lights up. Goes dark.

“I figured you could relate,” Ernie says, his eyes on Scott’s face. There’s something like pity in those eyes. “I mean, you basically retired early, too.”

“I’m not retired,” Scott says, and it comes out louder and harsher and _meaner_than he intends, but he can’t stop, he’s repeating himself: “I’m not _fucking _retired, Ernie; come on, I’m going on tour this winter. I’m going to be working every damn night and sleeping on a bus in the middle of nowhere.”

You can’t rattle Ernie. He just puts up his hands and steps back and shakes his head. Scott’s readying himself to smooth things over when a tourist couple enters and beelines for the margarita machine, and Ernie leaves him alone with a salute and a sympathetic smile. Scott relaxes; Ernie understands; it’s okay. His random bursts of temper, which had gotten better after those endless, dragging counseling sessions with b2ten, which have gotten worse again, here in Florida, haven’t put Ernie off, too.

He tracks back, in spite of himself, to the tourist couple. She’s got dark hair and a big grin; keeps putting her hand on the guy’s arm as if to steady herself and laughing, her head thrown all the way back, her eyes fixed on his face like he’s the funniest thing she’s ever seen.

Scott can’t understand it. He’s just some guy. Early 30s; kind of skinny, wearing a visor. A fucking visor.

The way she’s looking at him, you’d think he’d hung the stars.

Ernie’s really distracted now, telling them about the drink specials, trying to sell them on the Miller Lite bucket (Scott recommends it, has lost more than a few afternoons to it). Scott lets himself go, lets his eyes fix on the couple while his mind drifts back to the last time T looked at him that way.

He’s careful with these memories. After the tour, if he’s being brutally honest with himself, that’ll be it; there won’t be any more of them, and that’s his decision, which—fine. It’s fine. It’s just that he wants to take care of the ones he has, you know?

His fiancée was talking the other night, at a different beach bar, about some medical journal article she and her friends were all discussing at work. It was about the way long and short-term memories are formed, and she was saying—he found this really interesting—that the more you go over something in your head, the less well you remember it.

Like trying to hold onto sand, she said, gesturing to the beach behind them. You grab it really tight and it’s falling away and you’re like, shit, shit, fuck, it’s gone.

Well, he doesn’t want to lose this one. He stares into his beer and lets it open up like a void, the dark neck of the bottle taking him down.

It’s just the two of them, side by side on the bus. Shoulders touching, just a little; every time they turned a corner he’d lean into the movement, more than he had to, and let his weight rest on Tessa. She caught on fast and started doing the same thing to him, the heat of her shoulder, of her skin in her thin sweater, lighting him up. By the look in her eyes, they were equally disappointed when the bus hit the highway and the road opened up before them into one long straightaway.

It’s just the two of them, the way it’s always been, under the surface. When it counted. On the ice. Right after. They’d been fighting and he knew things were changing; knew she saw that he was texting more, and not her. Knew she’d maybe heard the rumors about his birthday trip.

He doesn’t want to think about the things they said in Japan. That’s not part of this memory. 

This memory is just the two of them, him and T. There are no more twists and turns in the road to give him an excuse, so he does the exaggerated yawn thing, counting on it to be so lame it works, and it does; she rolls her eyes but she’s laughing and leaning into him, putting her head on his shoulder. “What are you even doing,” she says, but there’s no malice in it.

He doesn’t answer. He didn’t know, in that moment, what he was doing. What she would do. She looked up at him, and her eyes were wide and green—_gorgeous green_—and he thought he could stare into them forever, just lock his gaze onto hers and watch, slow joy blooming inside him, as she smiled, and her eyes lit up, and she said, “Scott.”

~

She goes out dancing with some friends. Why not? They have press events the next day, and then she and Scott have a rehearsal she doesn’t want to think about. She’ll have to be on, in that studio with him, trying to force him to meet her eyes. Not tired, not the slightest bit weak or sloppy or distracted or vulnerable—just a still shining wall of glass, a mirror in the shape of a person. Reflecting back at him, relentlessly: you fuck-up; you idiot; look at me _look_, just look what you did. Who you hurt. What you gave up. Look at it.

So it’s not the greatest night for dancing.

But when she stepped out onto the street earlier, she felt a touch of early autumn in the air, felt the city changing, pulling into itself. The lazy spread of summer, everyone sprawled out at sidewalk tables or lounging on balconies or biking through parks, had contracted, only the tiniest bit, but it was enough. She stood on the sidewalk and took a deep breath, moved her fingers through air that didn’t feel humid, just crisp and cool on her skin, and she decided: _tonight, yes, it’s okay to have fun_.

She’s the one who works the hardest. That’s always kind of been the deal, right? As a little kid: _you’re not a natural skater, Tessa, not like Scott, but you’re a beautiful dancer, sweetie; you move so well, you’ll just have to practice more, that’s all, so you can keep up with him_. As a teen, her whole body burning with pain, Marina’s voice in her ear: _faster, faster; no, no, what do you even think that looks like; Scott, you’re fine, it’s Tessa_.

It’s Tessa.

In her twenties, her late twenties, when she started to think about what life after skating would look like and realized, way before Scott, pining for his land of flannel and cheap beer, that you had to work for more than four minutes on Olympic ice and the eyes of nine judges. You had to work for _all of it_, all the time, and it never stops, not until you want it to. Not until you make that choice.

That was what she tried to tell him, that night in Japan.

The music in the club is too loud, a constant screech-banging in her ears. She has to shout to be heard, so eventually she just stops talking and floats, dances a little, stops. Keeps track of the two women she came with until she doesn’t. She’s not drinking—much, she tells the vodka soda in her hand; she’ll make it an early night. But there’s something calming about being here, in this big anonymous rolling crowd. It’s not a Tessa Virtue thing to do, but the Tessa Virtue things are wearing on her; she can’t handle any more still cool air, flower scents, mint tea. Her phone is pulsing with texts, has been for the last day or so, but—she flicks the screen, sends the messages rolling by, lips quirking down in spite of herself. But she doesn’t want to text the person sending them back; isn’t interested, doesn’t want to deal with the secrecy and the rumors and the covert ramp up of small social signals that will inevitably be tracked back and analyzed by fans like bloodhounds.

Speaking of. She holds up her phone, films a video, short and sweet, a flash of her cheek, her hair, swirling in the pulsing dark. Posts it to her stories.

She’s restless. Which, you’d think a dance club would be the perfect place to be when she’s feeling that way, but it’s not; there’s something driving her from place to place; she can’t settle, not for long, picking her drink up, putting it down, smiling at a guy who’s staring, who may or may not recognize her, who may or may not be trying to pick her up. Moving her arms and shoulders, but she’s not fully comfortable, can’t get lost in the movement.

Time passes. The music blares. She finds her friends, loses them again. Someone buys her another drink and she swears it’s the last one, that she’s ramping down for the night. Big day tomorrow, after all.

That’s what’s bugging me, it’s the damn rehearsal, she thinks, just before a hand comes down on her shoulder and she all but screams and throws her fresh drink in the unseen person’s face.

But she knows that hand, she realizes a second later, knows it maybe better than her own. Knows its warmth, knows the weight and feel of it as it moves across her body, down her shoulder and through her hair, as it clutches her side, skims her hip and holds, hot, at her waist.

“Scott?” She turns, her jaw dropping. With force, she schools her features back into her slightly pleased, remote smile. Did he get lost? Is she hallucinating? But she won’t show shock; she won’t even seem surprised. “Hi.”

He doesn’t look good. He hasn’t looked good the last few times she’s seen him. Is it obvious because it’s him, Scott, and her, Tessa, or does everyone see it? Both of them have changed since Pyeongchang; there’s no way to keep their bodies that perfectly honed, like razors, when you’re living day to day and training just a few times a week. If that. He cut off his hair (don’t think about why); so did she.

But it’s more than these surface things, she thinks, looking at him now, the lights of the club coruscating around them, casting shadows across the planes of his cheeks, the lift of his brow. He looks slumped, somehow, like he’s working too hard to get through the day and the strain is showing—in his jaw, the way he holds his teeth, clenched together as if he’s always having to bite back words.

“Hi,” she repeats, when he doesn’t speak, just looks at her in the bouncing lights. Her hair is in her face. She pushes it back, feels her cheeks; they’re warm. “Scott. I didn’t realize you’d flown back already. Why are you _here_?”

And in spite of herself, she’s looking over his shoulder, trying to see if she’s here, too; her, the fiancée. But there’s no sign of her.

Scott shrugs and for just a moment he looks amused. “I saw your story,” he says, gesturing vaguely at her phone, clasped, forgotten, in her hand. “On the thing.”

_The thing_. She smiles in spite of herself. Then—with concerted effort—she drains the life out of her grin so it’s just her regular polished hi-world-everything’s-fine Tessa Virtue Smile™ and nothing special, nothing for him.

“I didn’t realize you were back on Instagram,” she says.

“Yeah, you know, my flight got in early, and at the hotel, I got bored …” He trails off and shrugs. His eyes leave her—finally; she hadn’t realized how fixed his gaze had been until it moved on and she inhales, hard, almost gasping the air into her lungs. “What a scene, eh?”

“Probably more yours than mine,” she admits, shifting, turning her body so they’re standing shoulder to shoulder and she doesn’t have to look him in the eye. Her eyes drift down to his left hand. He’s not wearing a ring. She wonders if he will. She wonders how that will feel, pressing into her hand when they’re skating this autumn.

How many times have they stood like this? Shoulders lightly brushing, a world spread out in front of them, waiting to begin. The club jumps and pulses in her vision; so many bodies, moving; so many people, coming together and splitting apart. Losing each other and finding each other again.

How many more times will they stand like this? She can almost hear the clock ticking down. Can almost feel the wedding looming. There can’t be many. She doesn’t think he’ll skate after that. Doesn’t think they’ll skate together, either.

But he’s here, tonight, and that’s what counts. He came here; he came to her. She doesn’t understand it, the feeling coursing through her, hot and thick, a lava of emotion. They turn back to each other at the same time—the synching instinctive, implacable, impossible to shake, and what comes out of Tessa’s mouth, before she can stop herself; what’s echoed in Scott’s, before he can stop himself, is:

“Want to dance?”

**Author's Note:**

> *
> 
> This is to-be-continued; more to come!


End file.
